Chitika announces CNET Co-branded eMiniMalls Units

Maybe it’s a little late at night for me but I don’t quite get it. They write:

“We are thrilled to announce the release of Chitika| CNET co-branded eMiniMalls units featuring best deals, promotions, offers and paid listings from hundreds of name brand merchants along with expert product reviews from CNET editors.” It will apparently mean “More deals, offers, and promotions for website visitors and increased revenue for our publisher clients!”

Ok I see the CNET logo but I don’t seen any reviews on the ad and I’m not sure if I’d really want them on ads on my blogs anyway as I doubt there’d be any payment for a click on them.

They finish their announcement post with:

“We are selectively integrating offers and promotions from CNET across the eMiniMalls network mainly on technology and consumer electronics related content pages.”

I’d be interested if anyone else can discern what that actually means for publishers? Hopefully someone from Chitika will clarify how publishers will benefit from it. For all I know it could be a great move for us but at a first glance it just seems ‘odd’.

I’m also interested to know if publishers have the option to switch the cobranded ads on and off or if whether they appear is determined solely by Chitika. While I’ve got nothing against CNET I know of some bloggers who would be dead against promoting them after dealings with them and I wonder how many content providers will be wanting to promote a competing content provider on their blogs? I guess it will depends upon what the rewards are.

We just completed integrating CNET feeds and started testing out the new feeds along with the current merchant feeds in our network.

How will publishers benefit from this?
As always we are constantly working on increasing the number of relationships with merchant partners and merchant feed aggregators, bringing on board additional merchant feeds, so that we will be able to offer a larger choice of paid product listings to our eMiniMalls clients. So basically with additional feeds the system will be able to search a larger base of paid listings to find deals and listings with the best CPCs..leading to higher revenues for the publisher client.

The co-branded unit will show up only when the backend system selects the merchant listings from CNET for a given keyword/product.

Option to turn on/off the reviews tabs?
Yes. We will be introducing the option to activate or de-activate the reviews tabs. As always, we are planning on giving the full “freedom of choice” to our publishers.

btw, the reviews tab will show up when there is a review for the selected product. Also, on some of the smaller units, due to space constraints the reviews tab might not show up.

So basically it sounds like the branding and reviews itself aren’t actually beneficial to the publishers. However, it will indirectly benefit us because it sounds like Chitika basically had to put the branding on if they wanted CNET’s product feeds. As such, more advertisers means more competition for adspace, which means more money for the publishers.

I could be interpreting the deal wrong, but it just sounds like Chitika was forced to brand the ads to be able to sign the deal with CNET to grab more ads.

IMO, the branding is a small price to pay if we are getting more products to choose from and potentially higher paying ads. Also, the rep just said the reviews can be toggled off. I’d like to see us getting paid if the review is clicked on, maybe even if it was just a little less money than clicking on the product itself.

The benefit to publishers is that there is increased advertisers in the system and increased advertisers will lead to increased performance as there will be more products to choose from (higher relevancy and therefore CTR) and hopefully a bit more bidding between advertisers which might lead to higher click prices….